Who'll Lead the NCGOP?

 

John Kane, insurgent candidate
for NCGOP Chair

There's a contest going on right now that'll be fought out and settled one way or another on the second weekend of June at the Khoury Convention Center in Greensboro ... the state Republican Party Convention, where the biggest question before the delegates will be who's going to be the next Chair of the NCGOP? Behind Door Number One: current chair Michael Whatley, running for reelection with the blessings of the old Republican mainstream; Door Number Two features an extreme-MAGA ideologue, John Kane, who comes from an election-denying gene pool of some prominence.

The Daily Haymaker, a MAGA standard-bearer who knows no end of serious contempt for the rest of the world, makes the savaging of Michael Whatley a long-running and therefore tiresome replay. The most recent Haymaker headline story ("Michael Whatley: A Cheney-Kinzinger Republican") opens like this:

The current NCGOP chairman loves to talk about Donald Trump and post pictures of himself with Trump’s plane. But much of what he does and says aligns much more with Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger — the two former “Republican” congressmen who colluded with Democrats on the farcical so-called “January 6 committee.”

It takes great courage and fortitude against sin, doesn't it? to sweep away every piece of evidence, including the ocular proof, as totally and unironically "farcical," but at least we know the mind-set we've waded into. Haymaker hates Michael Whatley (at least in today's blog post) because Whatley supposedly "boasted" that he had been the first Republican state leader to "condemn the mob."

Michael Whatley

But who's John Kane, you ask. John Kane is the number one son of an elder John Kane, a renown Raleigh mega-developer who was actually honored as Tar Heel of the Year in 2016. The elder Kane is also renown for raising big money for Republicans. The younger John Kane (he who would be chairman) emphasized his MAGA bona fides in an interview with Haymaker, hitting especially "election integrity," which is MAGA code for a cascade of conspiracies: "The election was stolen and we have to prevent more theft and all Democrats (and some RINOs) are suspect."

Kane also seems on-board for punishing Sen. Thom Tillis and other RINOs for snubbing MAGA orthodoxy, so if Kane wins, we might expect a purge-night with a lot of screaming.

A blow for the Haymaker crowd: Way back in January, Donald Trump endorsed Michael Whatley for reelection. That was before there was a John Kane campaign, so the Trump endorsement perhaps means only that he didn't have another choice.